(please visit the link above to form your own opinion)
This is a good example to start out with - issue a challenge defined in a particular way and then claim victory when the other side cannot answer the challenge the way you want. Listen to conservative talk radio for other examples (Shawn H. comes to mind).
Logic Problems in this Article
General
The challenge is to state "exactly what happened on Easter".
First - understanding "exactly" what happened on Easter is something a Christian studies for a lifetime. The concept of God sacrificing his Son (or of experiencing death Himself) is something that a Christian studies for insights that change over a lifetime. Even restricting oneself to the Resurrection and the events shortly after - understanding what God wants us to learn from the telling of those events is a lifetime task. The challenge encourages Christians to do something that should run counter to being a Christian - the attempt to pretend we "know" and "understand" all there is to understand about God.
Of course, this ignores what the author is trying to do. He wants to know what events took place in detail, including the order. This is the beauty of the "unanswerable challenge" - just answer me this: "When did you stop beating your child?"
Let's press on anyway. The author gets excited that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the various Gospels together with Acts. An exhaustive discussion of each "inconsistency" is beyond my patience - but let's look at two problems.
First, the basic premise is that four different authors (Acts is generally assumed to be written by the author of Luke (and if you nit-pick with me on this, you may also pretend I care)) should produce identical accounts. This is absurd - it is well known that the authors had vastly different audiences and so emphasized different things. This article is supposedly written by an ex-preacher - but you have to wonder what type of education he had. It is stunning that the Gospels overlap and agree to the extent that they do! Note that each Gospel was written for a specific group of people to prepare for an event that the writers thought was imminent - there was no need to document every detail in each document the same way.
Note: the author claims: "I am not a fundamentalist inerrantist." But this is after he claims that the Gospels differ on the first sighting after the resurrection (why would the authors care about the "first" sighting? why wouldn't they choose sightings that they had better knowledge of, fit the dramatic flow of their account, etc?) and after he worries about whether the stone was moved in the presence of the women or not. If it walks like a fundamentalist inerrantist, ...
Second, even the specific examples are poor. Consider "when did the ascension take place?". The author asserts:
"Luke- In Bethany"
"John- No ascension"
"Acts- Mount of Olives"
(and others)
John does not say there was no ascension - it ends with "Jesus did many other things as well. If everyone of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written." The most you can say is that John does not record any ascension. If anything, John rebuts the author's primary assertion - that the Gospels should agree. John strongly implies that there was so much going on that anyone writing about it would have to self-edit.
As for Luke and Acts disagreeing - pretty amazing that the same author would disagree with himself. Unless Jesus ascended into heaven (or appeared to) more than once. (The challenge was to Christians - not to specific Christians who claim to know of a single Ascension).
My last observation is that the author uses one last "trick" - he uses a weak argument by those supposedly disagreeing with him and shoots it down. He uses the example of the elephant - where one observer feels a leg and deduces a tree, etc. But that argument does not work against him because the observers are all wrong anyway! Well, the author is right and it is a poor argument against him - but what does that prove?
Sorry, even if my faith was based on logic and reason - this article would do nothing to shake it.
email me at doug@hardts.net